


Unto the Breach

by elicitillicit



Series: Assorted Drabbles and Shorts [11]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 10 points if you can spot the Henry V reference, F/M, War, but still, if you don't like the mention of torture, lbr voldemort will always be torturing someone, lucissa light of my life, some torture; not graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-29
Updated: 2015-09-29
Packaged: 2018-04-24 00:06:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4897525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elicitillicit/pseuds/elicitillicit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here's a secret for you: Draco Malfoy was an accident.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unto the Breach

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: things you said when you thought i was asleep / things you said when you were scared.

Here's a secret for you: Draco Malfoy was an accident.

Narcissa is twenty-four years old and swallowing screams as she watches her schoolmates tear their skin from their bones while a madman casually waves a wand around and smiles benignly down at them. Bellatrix routinely brings young Muggle boys home  _for sport_ , and she can hear them crying at night, their sobs not quite drowned out by her sister's and brother-in-law's sick, mad laughter.

She is a daughter of House Black and she knows that even in peacetime, families hurt their children. She swears that she will not bring a child into a world this broken.

So she brews illegal contraceptive potions in her bathroom sink and bites her tongue when her new husband is tortured for not yet producing a pureblood heir. He's always rough when he takes her, now, eyes wild and arms shaking from the aftershocks of the cruciatus.

She runs out of bloodwort one day, and that's all it takes.

* * *

 

She is not ashamed to say that she would have gotten rid of it if the Dark Lord had not cast a pregnancy test that night in a bid to mock Lucius for his infertility. Her heart grows cold in her chest when his wand bathes her belly in gold light.

Her husband is ecstatic. Bellatrix leads the charge down to the nearby village to steal children for their revels.

Narcissa weeps, and she tells them it is from joy.

 _I would have killed it to protect it,_  she confesses into Lucius's back when the manor is finally quiet – a thick,  _sated_ kind of quiet that leaves a coat of filth around the insides of her lungs.

She turns away before she can see his ribs collapse on a breath.

* * *

 

Draco is born two minutes after midnight in early June while the Dark Lord is downstairs murdering the McKinnons.

Lucius wants to name him Abraxas, after his father, but Narcissa says  _over my dead body_.

She names him after the stars. She prays that he will live his life removed from the base  _ugliness_ of war on earth. She prays that he will have the wisdom to guide himself.

* * *

 

The Dark Lord falls, and Narcissa dismantles the death spell over her son's cradle that she'd rigged to go off in the event of her passing.

She and Lucius pretend that the dark years never happened. She lives with the guilt of being ready to kill her child to save him from the Dark for the rest of her life, and prays that Draco will never know war.

Then the Dark Lord rises and folds her sixteen-year-old son into his embrace.

The world goes to shit again.

* * *

 

Lucius is different in this war.

He does the bare minimum required to protect his family in his family's house, and while Narcissa notices this, the Dark Lord does too.

Then he miscalculates and ends up in Azkaban, and her son offers himself to the devil to save her from a wand at her neck.

Narcissa weeps, and she tells them it is from pride.

She wants to say that she would have died to protect him, but the time for that magic has passed.

* * *

 

They lose sight of Draco in the last battle, and she curses herself for giving him her wand when she should have used it to bind him to her side.

 _Potter lives_ , she murmurs to Lucius as they trundle along behind a heartbroken Hagrid carrying a very alive Harry Potter.

He casts his eyes to the towers looming ahead of them, and she can read the despair in his face. The moment that Potter stumbles to his feet, they are all dead. Narcissa would be lying if she says she isn't terrified.

 _So we will run_ , Lucius whispers back.

And that is how they are recorded in that last, frantic skirmish: the two Malfoys, screaming for their son with their hands open and empty, dodging wand fire from both sides.

 _I would die for you_ , Narcissa promises.

She runs.

 


End file.
